Editor’s note: This op-ed is part of a series by Eli Steele exploring White guilt in America and the West. Steele is the director of the newly released documentary essay, “White Guilt.” See the film at WhiteGuiltFilm.com.
One of the most striking images of the riots that I saw sweeping France in recent days was that of a burning school in Nantes. The student movement in the streets around the school called itself a demand for education.
I was scrolling through my X feed when I saw the image of a burning trash can outside Lycée Nelson Mandela. The flames spread to the walls of the building and into the glass entrance hall. There were still students in their classrooms and, thankfully, every one of them got out.
When this school opened 12 years ago, its construction cost approximately €64 million, and it was touted as a beacon of hope and possibility for young people. Now the school has been shuttered for repairs, and its 1,700 students must learn from home for the time being.
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And that is just one school. According to the education minister, 24 schools have been burned or ransacked since late September, and about 30,000 students won’t see the inside of their classrooms for weeks. More than 6,500 people have been arrested, most of them minors. At least 215 students have been hurt, along with 85 teachers and staff. A 16-year-old lost the use of an eye. In La Ciotat, a physics teacher was sprayed in the face with gasoline and struck by a student from his own lycée while trying to put out a fire.
Many media figures and nonprofit organizations like Amnesty International emphasized the students’ demands for better educational conditions and criticized the police response, while also acknowledging violence by some demonstrators. The demands were for more teachers, smaller classes and decent buildings.
In the more shocking videos that flowed from the streets of France out into the world, there were teachers who made a point of standing with the students in the streets. In some cases, parents and union members joined in. The mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, stood with students who were blockading their own school and argued that violence can sometimes be legitimate, although he also said he opposed violence and called for de-escalation.
As one watches the footage of students swarming the streets, seemingly with impunity, one has to wonder how the civilization that gave the world Voltaire, Rousseau, Camus and the free public school arrived at a place where schools can burn amid a movement demanding better schools.
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In more ways than one, this is just an old story. A post-1960s story. What is happening in the streets of France is the latest iteration of the White guilt formula that has its roots in America.
My father, Shelby Steele, has written about White guilt since the 1980s. For him, White guilt is not personal. It is not the guilt a person feels for something he did. Almost no Whites alive today owned slaves or ran colonies. How can one feel guilt for sins one did not commit?
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White guilt is collective guilt. The left has condemned all Whites for the sins of the West, from slavery and segregation to colonialism. It has made whiteness a symbol of historical evil that must be torn down. In doing so, it has created the terror of being called a racist or a colonialist and stripped of moral authority. To escape that terror, many Whites try to buy their way out. But only the “oppressed” can grant innocence, and so a bargain is struck. The “oppressed” sell victimhood for power. The “oppressor” buys innocence with deference, programs and lower expectations, and when the pressure is high enough, silence in the face of the match. Both sides get what they want, except the children, who are mere pawns.
There is a difference between then and now. In the 1960s, people were oppressed. Today they are taught oppression. Most of these students never lived under colonialism. They have been taught that they still do. So, we should not be surprised, and yet it is still startling, that one of the main features of these protests has often been the Palestinian flag. A flag about Gaza has nothing to do with class sizes in Nantes, and yet it says everything about this movement.
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It does two things at once. First, it is an accusation. The students have been taught that Israel is the genocidal oppressor and the Palestinians their innocent victims. When they raise that flag, they are accusing France of being like Israel. Second, it is the claim that the students are the Palestinians in this situation and therefore they are the inheritors of the victimhood that the flag symbolizes. They have granted themselves innocence and moral legitimacy through victimhood.
When the Saint-Denis mayor claims that violence can be legitimate, he is merely following the script of the Black Lives Matter activists who called the 2020 looting across America reparations. If he stood against the students and demanded the Western values of responsibility and accountability, he would be branded a traitor to the cause. After all, the victims must remain victims.
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The blockades have spread from the suburbs into Paris, all the way to the most elite lycées in France, and even private schools. These private school students come from comparatively privileged backgrounds and, judging from the photos of the barricades, many are White. White guilt rewards even the White students if they do one key thing: dissociate from the evil West. Their reward for allying with the oppressed is innocence.
No matter what France does, it loses. Every attempt by the “oppressor system” to restore law and order becomes a new grievance for the oppressed. When one insists that a newish €64 million school is not a symbol of neglect, one is cast out with contempt as a racist. When a care worker at a Marseille bus stop told students not to smash the shelter and to go protest instead, a 15-year-old fired a flaming spray into her face. Afterward, she still called their cause “noble, legitimate.”
The “oppressed” will never give up the grievance, because under White guilt it is their only power. The White guilt elites only care about the innocence they gain from escaping the oppressor box via allyship. After all, they see their own nation as the oppressor. So the decline continues.
What burned in Nantes was not just the school. It was the idea that a nation can defend itself, its laws and principles without first confessing to its past sins. White guilt makes that defense difficult, if not impossible. And that is what gives White guilt its power as the most destructive force in America and the West. It turns the people who built the school into the people who watch it burn and call it social justice.
